Finland declares war on Germany

On 3 March 1945, at a session of the Finnish Council of State – the government of Prime Minister Juho Kusti Paasikivi – it was entered in the minutes that a state of war had existed between Finland and Germany since 15 September 1944. Chronologies of events record under this date that Finland declared war on Germany with retroactive effect. That is a simplification. Neither side ever made a formal declaration of war, either in the autumn of 1944 or later. The Finnish government was not starting a new war; it was officially acknowledging a state of affairs that had lasted for half a year: since the day on which the deadline for the withdrawal of German troops from Finland expired and the Kriegsmarine attacked the island of Suursaari. Some Finnish chronologies give the date as 1 March. The date of 3 March comes from the document that closed the matter, the government minutes of 1954, which cite the entry “of 3 March 1945”.

In March 1945 German soldiers were still present in the far north. The Lapland War, fought since the autumn, was petering out at the country’s north-western tip, while in the south Finland lived under the supervision of a Soviet control commission and awaited its first post-war elections. In this setting the formal acknowledgement of a state of war was a political rather than a military gesture.

A war without a declaration

Finland had fought alongside the Reich since June 1941. After entering the war against the USSR it waged its own Continuation War, as it was called, while the German 20th Mountain Army was stationed in the north of the country. In the summer of 1944, after the Soviet offensive on the Karelian Isthmus and the resignation of President Risto Ryti, power passed to Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. On 2 September Finland broke off relations with Germany and demanded the withdrawal of its troops by 15 September, and on 4 September it ceased fire on the Soviet front.

The Moscow Armistice, signed with the USSR and Britain on 19 September 1944, obliged Finland to disarm the German forces remaining on its territory and to hand them over to the Soviet Union as prisoners. It did not, however, require a formal declaration of war. Compliance with its terms was supervised by the Allied Control Commission headed by Colonel General Andrei Zhdanov, whose first members arrived in Helsinki on 22 September.

The first clash came even before the armistice. On the night of 14–15 September the Germans landed troops on Suursaari in the Gulf of Finland and were driven off, an episode that marked the beginning of the Lapland War. On land, “autumn manoeuvres” went on for several weeks: the Germans withdrew according to Operation Birke and the Finns followed them by tacit agreement. At the end of September Lieutenant General Hjalmar Siilasvuo’s III Corps clashed with the German rearguard near Pudasjärvi, and when the control commission demanded plans for a real campaign, Finnish troops landed on 1 October at the port of Tornio on the Swedish border.

The commander of the 20th Mountain Army, Colonel General Lothar Rendulic, responded with scorched-earth tactics. In mid-October the Germans blew up buildings in Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland, and the ensuing fire consumed most of the town. According to Finnish estimates, some 40–46 per cent of the buildings in Lapland were destroyed, along with hundreds of bridges and thousands of kilometres of roads. About 100,000 inhabitants had earlier been evacuated to the south and to Sweden.

Throughout this time neither government announced that the two states were at war. For the Finns it was more convenient to present the fighting as the fulfilment of the armistice terms – the removal of foreign troops from their own territory. Berlin, for its part, had no reason to proclaim a war against a country from which it was in the middle of withdrawing.

An entry in the minutes

In the winter of 1944–1945 the question ceased to be a purely military one. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 the Great Powers decided to invite to the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco those states that had signed the Declaration by United Nations and declared war on the common enemy by 1 March 1945. In the last weeks before the deadline one country after another declared war on Germany, from Latin America through Turkey and Egypt to Saudi Arabia.

This mechanism did not apply to Finland. It had not signed the declaration, and in Allied eyes it was a defeated state that had fought on Germany’s side for three years and was awaiting a peace treaty. The entry of 3 March, made after the Yalta deadline had already passed, gave it no seat in San Francisco, nor did it bring anything of the kind. Its significance lay elsewhere: it put the legal position in order. The Constitution of 1919 laid down that decisions on war and peace belonged to the president with the consent of parliament, the Eduskunta. The government was therefore not declaring war but recording, by administrative procedure, a fact that had come about in the autumn on German initiative. According to some Finnish chronologies, the government also concluded that, by virtue of this state of war, Finland could claim compensation from Germany. From the point of view of Moscow and the control commission, the entry confirmed that Finland had genuinely broken with its former ally. For Helsinki it was also an argument for the future, in peace negotiations in which the country wished to be seen not merely as defeated but also as a state that had driven the Germans from its territory by its own efforts.

The backdating to 15 September 1944 was not arbitrary. On that day the Finnish ultimatum on the withdrawal of German troops expired, and the first exchange of fire took place off Suursaari. The Finns regarded the preceding weeks, from the breaking off of relations on 2 September, as a period during which the Germans were still entitled to leave the country in an orderly fashion.

Finland in March 1945

The war that the government recorded in its minutes was practically over. Since November 1944 the 20th Mountain Army had held on only in Finland’s north-western “arm”, around Kilpisjärvi, covering its positions in Norway on the Lyngen Fjord. By February 1945 only a few hundred Finnish soldiers remained there, mostly the youngest conscripts, since the army had been demobilised in accordance with the armistice. The last Germans left Finland on 27 April 1945, when a Finnish patrol planted a flag on the Three-Country Cairn. According to Finnish figures, the Lapland War cost the Finns 774 killed, 262 missing and about 2,900 wounded.

More important for the country was what was happening in the south. On 17 November 1944 Paasikivi, an advocate of accommodation with the USSR, became prime minister; in a speech on 6 December 1944 he declared that Finnish foreign policy must never be directed against the Soviet Union. The government dissolved organisations deemed fascist and released political prisoners, and the Communist Party of Finland, illegal since its foundation in 1918, was at last able to operate openly. Zhdanov and the control commission pressed for the removal from public life of the politicians held responsible for the war.

Two weeks after the entry in the minutes, on 17 and 18 March 1945, the first post-war parliamentary elections were held. Turnout was about 75 per cent, the highest in the country’s history up to that time. According to the official results the Social Democrats won 50 seats, while the Finnish People’s Democratic League, which brought together communists and left-wing socialists, and the Agrarian League won 49 each. In April Paasikivi formed a new government in which the communist Yrjö Leino became Minister of the Interior, a fact of great consequence for state security in the years that followed.

Its place in the war

The entry of 3 March 1945 was one of the last acts in Finland’s parting of ways with the Reich, which had begun with the breaking off of relations in September 1944. Militarily it changed nothing. Politically it settled a question that had been left unspoken during the Lapland War: a country that had been Germany’s ally for three years officially recognised itself as its enemy. Other former Axis states – Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary – had followed a similar path in the second half of 1944, except that there the change of sides was bound up with the arrival of the Red Army. Finland did it by itself and avoided Soviet occupation.

This did not alter the country’s status in the eyes of the victors. Finland was not among the founders of the UN. In 1945–1946 the politicians held responsible for the war were put on trial, among them former President Ryti and Väinö Tanner. On 4 March 1946 Mannerheim resigned the presidency, and parliament elected Paasikivi as his successor. The Paris Peace Treaty of 10 February 1947 confirmed the terms of the armistice: the 1940 border, the loss of Petsamo, the lease of Porkkala and reparations to the USSR. Finland was admitted to the United Nations only in December 1955.

Formally, the state of war with Germany lasted a long time yet. The Reich ceased to exist in May 1945, but no peace treaty between Finland and Germany was ever concluded. Only in 1954 did the government headed by Sakari Tuomioja enter in its minutes that, since hostilities had ceased and relations with Germany had for several years been developing peacefully, the state of war recorded on 3 March 1945 was to be regarded as ended. The war that nobody had declared thus ended just as it had begun: with an entry in the government’s minutes.